by Dave Daren
“Here’s what they have posted online,” Jessica set down a tablet in front of us, and we flipped through a photo slideshow.
“Oh my gosh,” Vicki gushed. “It’s unbelievable.”
It was stunning, with marble staircases, high vaulted ceilings, antique chandeliers, and gold plated railings.
“It looks like Daddy Warbucks mansion,” I remarked.
“You’re not wrong,” Jessica said. “The theatre was designed during the same time period that Annie would have been set in, so the architecture is similar. You’d be the first to be married there, at least since the renovation.”
“Right,” Vicki still flipped through the photos. She stared at one, with a crimson red rug flowing through the lobby.
“If you look at the ceiling in that photo,” Jessica said. “You can see that they’ve uncovered an original fresco. It’s been painted over at some time, but it’s got caricatures of all the famous silver stars at that time. Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, you name it.”
“Wow,” I smiled and nodded approvingly. “It is really something.”
“I’ve found the dimensions for the lobby,” Jessica said. “It’s a large space. In the early days, they would have parties in that lobby. Legend has it that Marilyn Monroe went to at least one of them.”
“I heard that growing up,” I said. “Everybody swears it’s true.”
“Well,” Jessica said. “The original bar area has been restored. So, if you wanted to do the reception there, we could. But based on the earliest estimations, a lobby that size can hold...I’d say...four hundred guests?”
“What kind of a guest list are we looking at?” I asked Vicki.
“Four hundred, huh?” I said. “That’s a big wedding.”
“Well,” Vicki smiled. “We know a lot of people.”
I smiled as I made a mental guest list. Yes, we did. Although, most of the guys I knew in California, wouldn’t understand my life now. We spent our days getting drunk, chasing women, and congratulating ourselves on how much God damned money we were making. Geez, we were all making so much money in those days. I couldn’t believe it then, and I still can’t believe it now.
I live a different lifestyle now. We still make good money, but it’s not about that anymore. It’s about building something, making a difference in this town. It’s about helping people that need help. And it’s us...me and Vicki and what we have together. I tuned back in to Vicki who was prodding me to look at a website template on Jessica’s tablet.
“So,” Vicki told me, “we’re going to do purple and white as our primary color scheme, because my dress is deep purple. I’ve already ordered it from Vera Wang.”
“Purple?” I smirked. “Your dress is purple, huh? Not white?”
“Please,” Vicki rolled her eyes. “I am so over the white wedding tradition. It is not even a thing. And your dad got married with a giant star on his crotch, so don’t talk to me about traditional wedding attire. At least I’m wearing Vera Wang.”
“He what?” Jessica raised an eyebrow.
We both laughed.
“Sedona,” I rubbed my face. “What else can I say?”
“Gotcha,” Jessica nodded.
“So what is this?” I pointed to the template.
“We want to set up a wedding website,” Jessica said. “It will be a touchpoint for your guests, and allow them to keep in touch with the wedding buzz and events. We can link it to your social media, and get the announcement out a lot faster. As a matter of fact, a lot of couples aren’t even doing traditional invitations and Save the Dates anymore.”
“I don’t know,” I told Vicki. “I think I’d like to have a paper invitation. Wouldn’t you?”
“It’s nice to have,” Vicki said. “But who checks their mail anymore?”
“Well,” Jessica said. “You could do both.”
My phone buzzed right then. It was Agent Winslow.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve got to take this.”
“Absolutely,” Jessica said.
Vicki watched me slip out into the hall with concern.
“Henry Irving,” I said once I’d gotten out of the room.
“Mr. Irving,” she said. “This is Agent Ashley Winslow.”
“Agent Winslow,” I said. “Good to hear from you. What can I help you with?”
“Well,” she said. “I just want to tell you that we brought in Roy Oberland for questioning, and with the information we had from Tony Sanchez’s testimony, we were able to get a confession out of him.”
“That’s great,” I said. “So the charges against Kelsi will be dropped?”
“Yes,” she said. “And on behalf on the FBI, we’d like to thank you for helping to get these guys behind bars.”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“Thank you,” Agent Winslow said. “Have a good day Mr. Irving.”
“Good day, Agent Winslow,” I said.
I ended the call, leaned against the wall, and laughed out loud. We had cracked another one. I went back into the wedding planning room, and Jessica and Vicki both stopped as soon as they saw me.
“She’s free,” I said.
Vicki jumped up and squealed. “She’s free?”
“Roy confessed to everything,” I said.
“Oh, that’s great,” Vicki said.
Jessica’s eyes ping ponged back and forth between us.
“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve been working on this smuggling case, and it’s become a monster with two heads.”
“Ah,” Jessica said. “I like to watch crime shows myself. Guilty pleasure.”
I laughed. “We’ve got our client off.”
“But we still don’t know who killed James Matthews,” Vicki mused.
“James Matthews?” Jessica asked. “Are you talking about the trumpet player that died on Sedona Nightlife?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You know about that?”
“I’ve read all the news reports and blogs on that,” she said. “It’s a freak accident, and I didn’t believe the heart arrythmia thing for a second. Those guys all hated each other, they were always arguing, the blogs say.”
I raised an eyebrow. I glanced around the pink and white room with gauze colored curtains and listened to her murder theory.
“My money’s on that trumpet,” she said. “I think the trumpet was poisoned.”
I stared at her in disbelief. The trumpet was poisoned?
“I don’t know,” she laughed and waved her palm. “I’m not an investigator or anything. I’m just a wedding planner that reads too many websites. And watches too many mystery shows.”
She gestured toward Benedict on the wall and laughed. Vicki and I didn’t say anything.
“So back to your wedding website,” she said.
“Right, right,” Vicki said and pointed to a template. “I think I like this one. But I’m not sure about this font.”
“That’s a good observation,” she said. “The designer on that one couldn’t decide either, so he recommended multiple fonts that would work well with this template.”
Vicki and Jessica agonized over fonts for the next twenty minutes or so, but I didn’t hear a word of it.
The trumpet was poisoned?
Chapter 21
We drove up to a small brown wooden house with a terracotta style roof and a copious flower garden.
“I guess if I had had to guess where AJ lived,” Vicki said. “It wouldn’t be here. I’d always imagined something a little more artsy.”
“She lives with her mom,” I said as we exited the vehicle.
AJ greeted us in the driveway. Outside of work, she wore denim shorts and combat boots, and a black tee under a studded black faux leather jacket.
“Hey,” she said in a somber tone. “He’s inside.”
“He’s in a lot of trouble if…” my voice trailed off.
“He didn’t do it,” she said. “I swear, I know him. He didn’t do it.”
“If he knows who did and doesn�
�t say,” Vicki said. “He could get in a lot of trouble in the end.”
AJ rubbed her forehead in stress. “This is all so complicated.”
“Can we just talk to him?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and motioned us inside.
We followed her up a stone pathway and into the house.
The front door opened to a foyer hallway, and a gorgeous abstract canvas painting filled most of the entryway. It looked like a Picasso imitation, with bold dark colors, and boxy shapes.
“My sister,” AJ said once she noticed me staring at it.
“She painted this?” I asked.
I didn’t know AJ had a sister, and I wondered if Harmony knew her.
“Yeah,” AJ’s tone was clipped. “Before...well, anyway.”
“Before what?” I asked.
“She died,” she stated simply. “Hit and run. She was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry, AJ,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“I don’t talk about it,” she said, “But that’s why I started that blog in the first place. I was going through a dark period and wanted to solve crimes. That’s why I don’t like people I know to read my poetry, because it’s about all her and the accident and I don’t want people to ask me about it.”
“Well,” I said. “You’ve helped a lot of people over the past year.”
She smiled weakly. “Yeah.”
She gestured into the living room. It was a spacious room, all in earth tones, and brown linoleum. Large windows let in the sunlight and brown and wicker seating spaces, dotted the large room, accented by luscious green plants at intervals. Several ceiling fans silently swirled and the breeze occasionally shook the leaves.
Ana and Tony sat on the couch.
“Thank you for coming,” Ana stood and shook our hands. She looked more at ease than she was at the police station. She moved about her home with grace in a flowing blue dress, and leather sandals.
“Can I get you something to drink?” her voice was calm, and its peaceful tone belonged in the earthen room.
“No,” I said. “We’re good.”
AJ stood in the entryway and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed arms and watched the exchange.
“Have a seat,” Ana offered Vicki and me.
We sat across from Tony who looked annoyed.
“I told the lady everything I know,” he insisted. “I don’t know anything else. Believe me. If I knew more, I would tell it, because of the immunity thing.”
“But the immunity only covered the smuggling,” I said, “and you knew that.”
“Of course I knew that,” he said.
“So you knew that anything you said about James’ death,” I said, “wasn’t covered under that deal.”
He was quiet and studied the floor.
“Look,” I said. “We’re lawyers, we can’t send you to jail. But, if you know about James’ death, you’re in a lot of hot water. We can help you navigate this process, but we’ve got to know what you’re dealing with.”
“Fuck,” he stood and ran his hands though his long dark hair. “I did everything you asked me today!”
His voice rose with frustration. “Please, I know you’re good with AJ and all, but please, talk to someone else. Talk to Roy. Talk to Irwin. Talk to Brent. I don’t know anything else!”
“Tony, Tony,” Ana said softly. “Calm down. It’s okay. They’re just here to help.”
On the other side of the room, AJ traced the floor with her boot. Tony shook his head at Ana.
“I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m sorry, AJ.”
He swiftly marched toward the front door. I did the only thing I could think of to get him to stay.
“I know about the trumpet,” I blurted out.
Tony stopped dead in his tracks.
“It was poisoned,” I continued. “And I know you know where it is.”
I didn’t know any of those things. I was just talking out of my ass. Fishing is the technical term. But, Tony turned around aan looked at me with a horrified expression.
“Do the police know?” he choked out.
Ho-ly fuck. Our wedding planner was right.
“Not yet,” I said. “But they will. Tell us what you know, and we can help you.”
He slowly walked back to the couch, and I caught AJ’s expression. She looked purely shocked.
“What about the trumpet, Tony?” she asked as she joined him on the couch.
“I don’t know that he was going to use it for that,” Tony said.
“Who?” I asked.
“This guy,” he said. “He came up to me one day in the shipyard, and told me he heard that I sold herbal remedies. I do. I grow stuff in my yard, and I get supplements and rare herbs from overseas. People buy from me. It’s a thing I do on the side. Western medicine is so behind other cultures. We don’t know anything about the healing remedies Mother Earth has.”
I drew a deep breath. I grew up with this stuff. When I was sixteen, I snuck out and got drunk with friends and none of us wanted to go home. In the morning, we were all hungover, and someone passed out aspirins. I remember staring at the little while pill wondering what it would do to me. My household didn’t believe in aspirin. We believed in cannabis oil.
Tony went on like this for a little while and finally I cut him off.
“So,” I said. “You were approached by a guy. Who was this guy and what did he want?”
“He wanted to talk to me about healing remedies,” he said. “So he invited me to coffee. He wanted to go to...Starbucks. Who goes to Starbucks?”
He shuddered.
“Anyway,” he said. “So I met him at...Starbucks...and he talked to me for a long, long, time about different healing remedies and he really knew his stuff. I didn’t know why he wanted to talk to me at first, because it seemed like he knew everything there was to know.”
He had a puzzled look on his face as he recalled.
“Eventually,” Tony said, “I just stopped thinking he was going to be a customer, and decided maybe he was a supplier. Then, it got weird. He started asking me about dark stuff, like how long it takes poison to enter the bloodstream, and different poisons and how long it would take to stop a heart. Then, I thought maybe he wanted to kill me, and I stopped drinking my coffee. Which was fine because, ya know, Starbuck sucks. I buy from Jittters because I like to support local farmers, and their coffee is just better.”
“I agree with you on that part,” I said.
“Anyway,” he shrugged. “Eventually he asked me if I knew how to get this plant called borrachero. And that’s when I got scared. I know about that plant, and it’s fuuucked up.”
He whistled and shook his head. “Do you know about it?”
I hadn’t heard of it. “No,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s also called devil’s breath,” he said, “because once you breath it in, it turns you into a zombie. It’s the freakiest ever. You have no control over your free will. People will tell you to give them money, and you will. People will tell you to sign over your house for free, and you will. It completely hypnotizes you. So, he asked me if I knew how to get it, and I told him I didn’t.”
“You didn’t get it for him?” I clarified.
“Fuck no,” he said. “There’s not much of it in the United States, but in some other countries, it’s an epidemic, and I didn’t want to be the one that introduced that plant to Sedona. It would be horrible.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I told him I didn’t know how to get it,” he said. “And that was the end of it. But, then the night of the Sedona Nightlife taping, I heard Roy on the phone, arguing about buying extra trumpet mouthpieces. He got off the phone and was complaining about how whiny the guys in the band were, and how the trumpet player had lost his mouthpiece somehow. He had this special brand of trumpet and you could only buy stuff for it in Flagstaff. So, there wasn’t time for the trumpet player to go all the way to Flagstaff and back, they wan
ted Roy to do it. So, he went to Flagstaff and came back in time for the taping.”
Tony shrugged dismissively. “I didn’t think it was any big deal at the time. Being in a band is like that, whatever. But, I watched the show that night at my house, and the guy that wanted the Devil’s Breath plant, was in the band. And then as soon as the trumpet player started playing, he drops dead. And I remembered the missing mouthpiece.”
“You believe that the guy in the band put this borrachero plant on the mouthpiece?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because it’s not really introduced in the United States, it wouldn’t show up on an autopsy. He knew that. He wanted something rare and deadly.”
“So why would he switch out the mouthpieces?” I asked.
“I guess he stole the mouthpiece to give him time to poison it without getting caught,” he said, “and in the meantime, the trumpet player thought he lost it. And then, he waited for a chance to switch it back? I haven’t got it all worked out. But that guy poisoned the mouthpiece. I know he did.”
“Who was the guy?” I asked, even though I knew.
“His name was Gary,” he said. “That’s all I knew.”
AJ gasped when she heard the name. “Gary...Zimmerman?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t put it together until later. He’s from that Amish family.”
“They are not Amish,” Ana corrected him in a motherly tone. “They just live naturally.”
“They’re weird,” AJ stated definitively. “Why would a Zimmerman come to you for plant advice.”
“If he didn’t want to get caught,” Tony said. “He wouldn’t want to use plants that could be traced back to his family and their farms, so he pretended like he wanted my advice, and then asked me to get it for him. It wasn’t a bad idea.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell this to the FBI?” Vicki asked him. “You gave them the impression that you did it.”
“Because…” he sighed. “Mrs. Zimmerman is a good client. She sells my stuff to her natural foods group. Once I figured it all out, and realized that this Gary was her son, I couldn’t do that to her. She’s a real nice lady. Really nice. She sometimes bakes me cakes and pies.”